Across the pond

I must pass on this gem from Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger’s report on what the world’s greastest good are saying at the Davos summit.

A blogging entrepreneur drew a useful distinction between old mainstream media (MSM) which had attention deficit disorder and the best bloggers, who were obsessive compulsive. Newspapers started out on stories or campaigns and then got bored. Bloggers never got bored of their own subjects.

I plead guilty to being ‘obsessive compulsive’ but don’t agree that it is a disorder. It actually helped my career in the old media. (admittedly wrorking for what Harry Evans used to call the ‘unpopulars’). My obsession with crooked businessmen and the lack of women in top positions in business and media, for instance, got me many good stories.

And, come to think of it, I made my first attack on the attention deficiit tendency of new media, when I spoke in the school debate in 1951 about television. I cannot remember the motion that I spoke to. But it was something sober and moderate like:

This house believes that television will rot the minds of the nation’s children.

I wrote this while my grandson little Joe was watching Ceebeebies. So I hope what I said in 1951 was not one hundred per cent right.

But old journalism and new journalism need obsessive compulsives who will keep at stories like the falling wall which killed a Camden child, until the Council is caused to change its ways. That means keeping on the story for many months while the various inquiries take place.

The debate in Davos should not be about new media versus old.

It should be about what we can do in both new and old media to get more good journalism.